The Theory and Politics of Subsumption
Workshop I
Room G15, Birkbeck University, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
25th May 2013, 12 – 6 pm
Programme
11.30 - 12.00 Registration & welcome
12.00 – 1.00 Christopher J. Arthur – Subsumption as a logical category
1.00 – 2.00 Rob Lucas - On the Uses and Abuses of Abstract Temporal Concepts for History
2.00 – 3.00 lunch break
3.00 – 4.00 Max Tomba - Hybrid subsumption and modern forms of slavery
4.00 – 5.00 Anthony Iles - Subsumption and Autonomisation
5.00 – 6.00 Open discussion
There is increasing recognition of the importance of subsumption, in Marx and beyond, as a category through which to think domination in the present. And yet despite this, proper research into the concept is still in its incipience. So whilst it has become almost a commonplace to refer to practices, social spheres or even life as such as ‘subsumed’ under capital, there is rarely clarity or agreement about what such pronouncements should be taken to mean. As such, subsumption is all too often employed as a synonym for capitalist power in the most general sense (‘everything has been subsumed under capitalism’, we are now living ‘in’ real subsumption, etc..), in a manner that tends to obscure rather than disclose the actual structures and dynamics of exploitation that shape our world.
This is the first in a series of workshops bringing together thinkers working on the theoretical and political dimensions of subsumption, with aim of clarifying what is at stake in the concept. The series is intended to provide a space for extended and focused discussion, with short presentations rather than lengthy papers, and an emphasis on working through problems collectively and identifying new directions for research.
The workshop costs nothing, but in the interests of a fruitful discussion the number of participants will be quite limited; priority will be given to those with an active research interest in subsumption (although this need not be academic). To register you interest in participating please contact Andrés Saenz De Sicilia: k1060900@kingston.ac.uk
Recommended reading
The only essential reading for the day is the short section on subsumption from ‘the Results of the immediate production process’, the appendix to Marx’s Capital vol.1 (pp. 1019-1038 in the Penguin edition, or available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm#469). Apart from this I have listed some other useful texts on subsumption below, although these are by no means necessary (or exhaustive). If anybody has trouble getting hold of any of these just let me know and I can send them to you.
Further sections on subsumption by Marx can be found throughout vols. 30-34 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (esp. Vol. 30, pp.54-348; vol 33, pp. 372-387; vol.34, pp. 93-121).
Chris Arthur, ‘The Possessive Spirit of Capital: Subsumption/Inversion/Contradiction’, in Re-reading Marx: New perspectives after the critical edition, Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi (eds.), Palgrave, 2009
Patrick Murray, ‘The Social and Material Transformation of Production: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume I’, in The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s Capital, Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (eds.), Palgrave, 2004
Massimiliano Tomba, ‘Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective’, in Historical Materialism, Vol. 17 no. 4, 2009
Endnotes – ‘A History of Subsumption’, Endnotes 2, http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/6
A Glossary of Subsumption, http://saladofpearls.blogsome.com/2013/01/29/a-glossary-of-subsumption-notes/
Enrique Dussel, Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63 (chapters 2 & 3), Trans. Yolanda Angulo, Routledge, 2001, http://libcom.org/library/towards-unknown-marx-commentary-manuscripts-1861-63
Jacques Camatte, ‘Capital and Community’ (chapter 3), Unpopular Books, 1988, https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/capcom/index.htm
Also, Massimilano Tomba appears on a panel the previous evening
‘Marxism in Culture’ seminar, Friday 24 May
5.30-7.30, Room 349, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Library
Marx’s Temporalities: a Roundtable Discussion with
Massimiliano Tomba, Stathis Kouvelakis and Peter Osborne
A short essay responding to a project by artists Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman exploring The Good Life via Henry D. Thoreau’s Walden. The publication for this project is distributed by Cornerhouse: http://www.cornerhouse.org/bookstore/product/the-good-life
It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow man an interest in your enterprise. – Henry D. Thoreau, Walden
To pose the question: ‘what is the good life?’ in an era of deficit-cutting austerity is a challenge. Which is to say, the question itself comes out easily enough, but who it might be addressed to is a matter entirely less clear. We live in an era in which reform and compromise with established powers no longer appears possible. A systemic crisis has ushered in apparently systemic resolve: there is no alternative, accept less, pay more, be afraid. Political economy: a set of questions and choices of how to live, how to manage resources, how to manage life; is, according to these arguments, not ‘political’ at all. The economy is not to be fundamentally questioned or discussed, its state is a fact, a statement and given that the books do not balance, the subsequent choices are about where to cut and when. Paying for the crisis is mandatory. In the sense that boom and bust are cycles of capitalism to which we are bound, like Sherlock Holmes to Prof. Moriarty, in mortal combat hurtling to our downfall. We’re all in it together. We paid for the boom, why should we not pay for the crisis too?
The reduction of political economy to simply economics is part of a movement to claim a scientific basis for the discipline and shield its practice from social questions. Yet in the early 19th Century this was not so, in fact political economy was a field of contestation in which the connections between the social and the purely economic were closely bound. In Walden, Thoreau returns economics to it’s Greek etymology oikos – meaning home, house or household – by entitling his first chapter ‘Economy’ and using it to describe his humble means of existence, home management, income and expenditure. Yet, he also enacts a living critique since his withdrawal to live simply by Walden pond is his response to a society entrained to the bustling inequalities of a rapidly developing capitalist economy. Thoreau did not wish to join in – his self-build experiment facilitated a temporary exit from wage labour. This act was critical and self-critical and it afforded him the time to spell out his criticisms of the society he wished to withdraw from in writing. This is plain; Walden represents no simple escape. As well as building a hut Thoreau sought to build a literary reputation by Walden pond and this he achieved.[p.315 Norton Critical Edition] We could say cynically, that Thoreau’s economy paid off – he stooped to conquer – his two years, two months, two days in the wilderness produced his lasting legacy. But, Thoreau was little recognised outside small literary circles until long after his death. His withdrawal reflected a strategy – to both withdraw and then attack. Moreover, his withdrawal was far from absolute and nor was Walden exactly the wilderness some perceive and mythify. The land Thoreau occupied was leased to him by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an important friend to Thoreau, his occasional employer and like him a member of the Transcendalist intellectual circle living around Concord Massachusetts at the time. Walden Pond was situated close to both a railway line and the town of Concord. It by no means diminishes Thoreau’s commitment to aesthetic and spiritual renewal to acknowledge it took place within close proximity to the developments of civilisation he questioned and discussions within the literary circle in which he shared his views.
Like ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, Thoreau chose to live simply in order to question human society’s customs and habits. Whilst for Diogenes asceticism took the form of living in a barrel, Thoreau is less extreme, seeking to teach through his lifestyle by dwelling in a basic hut and living from subsistence farming. Thoreau’s hut reminds us of the shack of another American critic of industrial society, Theodore Kaczynski AKA the Unabomber. A reconstruction of Kacynski’s cabin is presently on display in the Newseum in Washington DC. In the late-1960s Ted Kaczynski had retreated to the woods of Montana, but in 1978 with the encroachment of development on his immediate environment he began a campaign of bombing against the ‘industrial-technological system’. Kaczynski’s campaign began by targeting airlines and engineering academics, but escalated in the 1990s to target vendors of computer systems, as well as ideologues and engineers of the emergent internet. His attempt to go ‘back to nature’ and live autonomously became entangled with a critique of cutting edge technological development. Whilst Kaczynski is often termed a neo-Luddite and draws sympathy from some neo-primitivists, anarchists and environmentalists his critique of technology advanced from basic rejection to encompass the problem of it’s imposition and the mobilisation of utopias justifying its introduction. The film, Das Netz (2003), by Lutz Dammbeck which investigates the Unabomber’s activities shows how many of the ‘cyber-elite’ which he attacked had been members of the 1960s counter-culture drawn to environmentalism, drugs and experiments with self-sufficient communes. It was these utopians’ beliefs in a totally connected and self-organising society, which led them to experiments with networked computing. We now live their legacy and it is highly questionable whether their idealism about computing is something shared by its users. Rather, it is the very pervasiveness of computing and communications technology, which drives a frequently stated contemporary desire to ‘escape it all’ or yearning for the simple life. These contemporary fantasies frequently correlate to the simplicity, self-sufficiency and autonomy embodied by Thoreau’s writings and it is worthwhile acknowledging that his own experiment took place and responded to the context of rapidly developing communication networks: the telegraph, national newspapers and railways.
Though definitely not a fanatic, Thoreau stands in a millenarian tradition which, dismissing the far-off promises of a paradise to be reached in the after life, seeks a heaven or at least an appreciation of a full life on earth now. His frequent shadowing of biblical prose cements this centuries old dynamic – common during and after the English Revolution – of attempting to live the divine words of the bible through everyday life applying them to the here and now rather than the hereafter. What perhaps saves Thoreau from the primitivist fantasy of total autonomy which consumed Ted Kacynski and continues to attract some critics of capitalism, is his desire to continue to communicate with his fellow man and moreover to develop the form of his means of communication – writing – in a personal and singular direction.
During the period he was writing up Walden, Thoreau’s writing adopted a form that responded to it’s authors need to develop a form of address which reflected his prolonged personal self-transformation, or self-cultivation, and spoke to its readers directly. [see Steven Fink, ‘The Language of Prophecy: Thoreau’s “Wild Apples”’, p.632 Norton Critical Edition] The journal Thoreau kept as a record of his daily walks and reflections during his time living by Walden Pond was a source for Walden and many more of his future writings. The journal is more true to life because it is processual, incomplete, porous to the action of environment upon the subject. Thoreau’s own literary-political process and myth is that of becoming an American prophet – developing a lived practice of parrhesia (speech critical of power), self-awareness and self-transformation – it is a legend which he lives up to.
The form Thoreau developed in Walden is surprisingly intimate and contemporary – we might even compare it’s combination of the diaristic, erudite and profound to blogging. In Walden Thoreau frequently ruminates on the state of journalism, the circulation of knowledge which must have held so much promise earlier in the 19th century as a cornerstone of American independence and freedom, but finds it merely reproduces mediocrity and the interests of the rich. It is a situation upon which our own time, at the beginning of the 21st century, presents little advance. Despite or perhaps because of a proliferation of independent media there is a concomitant need to find a space of writing and thinking: ‘I desire to speak somewhere without bounds’. It is this aspect of Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman’s project – to find a space for quietude and for speech – which cuts a compelling vector through Thoreau’s work to our shared present.
The Good Life assembled two spaces; one, The Thoreau Cabin, a copy of Thoreau’s hut at the edge of Miterdale, a forest in Eskdale, Cumbria; another, The Good Life Stage, a hybrid public and performance space set in the hall of the Lanternhouse in Ulverston. As such, The Good Life reflected on Thoreau’s movement of isolation and engagement, posing it publicly. Just as Thoreau situated his economy in his house in the woods, The Good Life sought to span debates of the private – the very possibility of solitude today – and the public – albeit the small public which their stage could accommodate. In each case, in each of these spheres, elements of their construction produced a form of estrangement. The stage was deliberately performative and uncanny. Whilst providing comfortable seating, it also required the audience to take a step from the more neutral gallery space of the Lanternhouse’s hall and onto a raised seating area facing a small stage. Depending on the view, The Good Life Stage could be considered either a utilitarian contraption for facilitating public speech and listening, or an artwork. It therefore must have occurred to some audience members, listeners or viewers that they themselves were the object of display as much as the speaker or performer. Assisting this sense of self-reflexivity, the stage was decorated with phrases and slogans gleaned and adapted from the works of Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Thoreau and other writers hand-painted in an array of playful and anachronistic fonts, the primary font referenced those developed by Billy Gilpin – a renowned local sign writer who worked in the Ulverston area for fifty years. Gilpin’s work is a part of the local landscape from which a tradition of artisan independence and eccentricity can be recovered. But it is also a useful cipher through which Ulverston’s porosity to outside influence could be explored. The complex circuit of utility, universality and particularity that the adoption and customisation of typeface passes through and carries contributed an ancillary interaction of the local and universal lines of flight for which Tyman and Rushton sought to provide a stage. Fonts travel and with them so do words.
All art is quite useless
Simulating simulations
The best is the most economical
We’d hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and discuss poetry in the evening
I have it all
Patronised by all nations
During one week in June across four different nights musicians and bands took the stage. While the stage was in situ at the Lanternhouse, six speakers visited to give talks and lectures on the stage, exploring themes of ecology, utopia and the good life. The stage formed the crux of a space of activation and dialogue – directly putting into question the putative uselessness of art proposed by the Wilde quote in the introduction above. Yet, though the stage appeared to follow a utilitarian logic in it’s construction it was also something baroque. Nor can we say that dialogue and discussion is always useful, it is rather that discussion, like art, has a relationship to utility but neither is over determined by this aspect.
The cabin built by Rushton and Tyman in Miterdale was modelled on a replica which stands by Walden Pond reconstructed from excavations of the foundations of Thoreau’s original cabin. The cabin had exactly the same proportions as Thoreau’s cabin and the same features, a door, window, pitched roof and the exterior was covered with thousands of small wood shingles. However, there was never any interest in pretending a realistic recreation of Thoreau’s cabin or his experience. It’s status as a simulation of a simulation enables it to open up to a baroque aesthetic reflexivity complementing that of the Good Life Stage. The cabin was not embedded into the ground as this was not permitted by the Forestry Commission and the chimney stack was neither real or functional, with ’70s brick wallpaper creating an illusion of the bricks common to an English vernacular. Inside the cabin it was made clear that the structure had been prefabricated and its designers deliberately left the framing exposed inside – there was no attempt to replicate the Thoreaus cabin interior – plaster walls, functioning hearth. The Forestry Commission insisted the artists provide a portaloo toilet. Lanternhouse insisted that visitors had a mobile phone for health and safety requirements. The Thoreau Cabin was in situ for six months from April until the end of September. During this time 25 people were resident there for varying periods. Though many were artists or arts professionals, the time they spent there was intended to be ‘idle’ time. Since the cabin was situated on a well-worn path through the forest, passers-by would often visit and engage the temporary inhabitants.
The question of utility and housing in capitalism is an interesting and prescient one. Since, as often becomes clear in moments of crisis, the ‘needs’ capitalist production satisfies are just as often passing illusions as fundamental human requirements. For successful exchange to take place a product must have use value, but, from the perspective of capital, use value is a mere necessary by-product of the production process. Human needs are just as often manufactured by this process and nothing that isn’t profitable can be useful in capitalism. For Thoreau, this conflict of utility in capitalism is most clearly perceptible in the fundamental need for shelter: ‘Our houses are such unwieldy property’ and ‘Men have become tools of their tools’. This is evident in the role of housing in the financial crisis of 2008. On one side housing remained a human need, on another the satisfaction on this need could only take place to the extent it could expand profits within the global financial system. Through complex financial instruments and global deregulation of mortgage markets the system through which most people financed the acquisition of their homes provided a source of easy credit feeding an immense asset price bubble. Once the real limit of peoples’ ability to pay was reached, profit stopped expanding and began instead to contract. Prior housing need was no longer viable and its fulfilment began to be reversed – this is most dramatic in the US where millions of sub-prime mortgage borrowers have been and will continue to be forced out of their homes. In Thoreau’s time, debt and property were already strongly linked: ‘It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit man could not afford to pay for.’ [p.28]. Thoreau is quite clear that this is no mere side effect of American capitalism in its infancy, rather ‘Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilisation vaults and turns its somersets […]’. Even by escaping to the woods to reduce his basic needs to a minimum, Thoreau could not avoid incurring debts. Shortly after establishing himself by Walden Pond he was apprehended by the local tax collector and charged with debts for failing to pay poll taxes, which left him in debt for several years and forced him back into waged work after Walden. The refusal to pay this tax, which was related to Thoreau’s refusal to vote, were part of his politics of civil disobedience and whilst his motivations are admirable – opposition to the Mexican-American war and slavery – his example flows into the strong anti-state and anti-tax lobby especially popular amongst survivalist groups in the US. These groups perceive the imposition of taxes to be a limit on their personal freedom and independence, but as far as their ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ is conditional upon private property and the monetary system they neglect to examine the labour of others this binds them to and the unconditional inequality and violence which goes with it.
Whilst Thoreau’s anti-slavery activism is sympathetic to the inequalities of his own society, there is a basic problem of condescension. His celebration of the poor man’s lot reflects a primarily aesthetic choice rather than material one. As such, it is common to the whole of modernity to find those who could make such choices, reproducing conditions of poverty in order to inhabit them ideally. On another general point, I think we should disagree with Thoreau when he said: ‘Should we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes be content with less?’ [Norton Edition p.28] Certainly we should not be content with less, particularly given our rulers’ current enthusiasm for austerity. In this sense, ‘the best is [not] the most economical’. Rather, we can only see what is best or most useful once we overcome narrow ‘economical’ judgement materially.
In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. p.217
Thoreau’s subtraction from society exposes the transience of its conventions – how what appear as natural and self-identical values are in fact subjective and illusory – but this does not necessarily mean that for man there is a state of nature to which it is possible to return nor that nature in itself is a panacea for human society. In fact, it would suggest the opposite and Thoreau’s work does not entirely eliminate this possibility. Rather, since Walden challenges the ways in which nature as convention can become the foundation entirely man-made arguments about work, exchange, human life and its organisation we can apprehend it as an argument for scepticism towards any given relationship between human society and nature. This scepticism could lead to simplification, or it could require the admission of the full complexity of human needs outside of the present system of social production and exchange. To see that an existing system narrows and canalises our desires and our ability to live fully is a first step. ‘To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.’ Walking [p.267 Norton Critical Edition]. To take such a step could involve a withdrawal much in the style of Thoreau’s return to simplicity, but the second and third step would have to overturn wealth as power over men and engage an expanding sociality and complexity. I like to think of this expanded ‘uselessness’ as not only economical but as aesthetic too – all life will be quite useless or will not be at all.
Imitation of Life? Vitalism, Exhaustion and Critique
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
24 April 2013
As a radical or renegade discourse, vitalism represents protest, disillusion, and hope. Life often grounds opposition today, after the political disappearance of a subject/object of history and scepticism about the philosophy of the subject in general. … A third way, Life disallows bourgeois stasis as certainly as it makes impossible the achievement of rational controls. In fine, Life conjures up experience, irrationality, and revolt. – Donna V. Jones, (2012: 17)
Workshop 4-6pm (TBC) Due to capacity this workshop is not open to the public, but to researchers at the UDK Graduate School and friends if you’d like to attend please send me an email [mailinganthony AT gmail.com] with the subject line ‘Imitation of Life’.
Anthony Iles and Benjamin Noys will lead a workshop focusing on their recent interests in vitalism and critique (Noys), markets, entropy, exhaustion and the end of probability (Iles).
In the second half of the nineteenth century a great wave of anxiety swept through the discourses of progress animating Europe at that time. The discovery of fatigue corresponded to the new scientific theories of thermodynamics. Thus, in terms which corresponded very closely to the applications of technology and organisation of human labour, science discovered the centrality of energy to the structure and movement of the universe and the threat of inevitable energy loss, dissipation and decay. Recent theories of financial speculation have stressed the need to renew the management of probable risk in a volatile system, yet the vast increase in productive computational power tends to exhaust diversity rather than augment it. Both its prospect of a future and the prospect of its absolute destruction revolve around forms of contingency which have little to do with probability. Recent social movements have often stressed an opposition between the mechanistic routines of capitalist society against the elasticity and inventiveness of life. This ‘political vitalism’ relates in practice to the very same energetics of these earlier discourses of thermodynamics and energy conservation by promoting life as a negentropic force of excess. By seeking autonomy ‘political vitalism’ claims to operate as a replacement for critique, but actually reproduces central mystifications of life under capitalism.
Ahead of the workshop we’d like to encourage attendees to read the following texts:
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘Exhaustion: Rereading Baudrillard’ from After the Future, AK Press, 2011 http://ge.tt/9VHPvla/v/0?c
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic http://ge.tt/64p5dRb
Frederico Luisetti, ‘Reflections on Duchamp. Bergson Readymade’, Diacritics, 2008 http://ge.tt/5swPQ6f
Screening 7pm Public and Free entrance
The workshop is followed by a film screening of 2 short videos by Downstairs Productions, Ilya Lipkin (US/Germany) & Joen P. Wedel (Denmark). The filmmakers will be present for and will join a discussion with Anthony Iles and Benjamin Noys after the screening.
Since 2010, the artists Ilya Lipkin and Joen Vedel have been collaborating under the rubric of a film production company named Downstairs Productions. Neither a real production company, nor a proper fiction, Downstairs Productions has provided the two with a cover under which to investigate questions of labour, value and artistic production through film and video. Working across genres and styles, Lipkin and Vedel gravitate towards the context specific, reflecting on their role as producers as well as on the relationship of artistic work to the new, networked, economy at large.
The Delegates (2010) was shot in a rubber manufacturing plant in Gotland, Sweden. The film is structured through a series of juxtapositions, cutting between scenes documenting the production process at the plant and scenes of Lipkin and Vedel acting out five interconnected vignettes on the factory grounds. The script for the film was generated through a process meant to mimic the assembly line of the rubber factory and is co-authored by several writers.
Untitled, (2012) is Downstairs Productions most recent work. This short video deals with the ideology of exercise and the institution of the gym. Without dialogue, and through a careful montage of constructed scenes, Lipkin and Vedel attempt to depict the endless feedback loop between the body and the computer, labour and appearance, value and health in the non-site that is the contemporary workplace.
This is the pyramid school. The sun shows into the star above the school and lights the school (a type of light that requires no electricity). The people go to the underground mine, which is lit by the star, to search for gold. This school is 5 years into the future because I’m going to hire people to build it in my backyard.
These were some notes prepared for the following event 25-26 January 2013:
http://thepublicschool.org/a-glossary-of-subsumption/
I drew extensively on the work of Endnotes, in particular a text called ‘The History of Subsumption’, Endnotes #II, available here: http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/6
Inherited from idealist philosophy (Schelling, Kant, Hegel) and used by Karl Marx to theorise the development of the capitalist mode of production, subsumption has emerged as an important term for contemporary theorists attempting to describe and periodise the development of technologies, knowledges and class relations under capital. These categories of human activity and society can be described as ‘under capital’ since ‘subsumption’, which can be translated as submission, domination or subordination, describes a process by which the particular (concrete labour) is subsumed by a universal (value or capital’s process of valorisation).
The shift from ‘formal subsumption’ to that of ‘real subsumption’ in our present moment is characterised by the profound separation of human needs from capitalist production, self-reproduction and expansion. Capital is no longer content to merely encompass existing forms of production in its pursuit of value, but must convert and transform all of life (production and reproduction) into capitalist forms. Through this ceaseless deterritorialisation, it finds ways to extract value across all forms of social, material and biological activity, radically altering them in its wake. Within this, our ways of relating, caring and of expression, of communicating and collaborating, are enclosed, templated and optimised. As ICT is folded into this process the creation of new forms of sociality, new edges, speeds and channels of communicating, and an endless wake of data are produced by and for subjects. ICT accelerates capitalist subsumption but also changes the nature of struggle against its domination, forcing it, and us, into more bound and arguably intimate confrontations.
Additional definition:
Subsumption means rather more than just submission. Subsumieren really means “to include in something”, “to subordinate”, “to implicate”, so it seems that Marx wanted to indicate that capital makes its own substance out of labour, that capital incorporates labour inside itself and makes it into capital. Jacques Camatte, ‘Capital and Community’
Marx theorises subsumption as a two-stage process by which capital takes hold of a existing process (formal subsumption) and begins to shape and transform it to its own ends (real subsumption).
Michael Heinrich
In the case of an already existing labor process being subordinated to capital, Marx speaks of the formal subsumption of labour under capital. The sole difference from pre-capitalist conditions consists in the fact that the laborers work for a capitalist rather than for themselves. […] If the labor process is transformed in order to increase productivity, Marx speaks of the real subsumption of labor under capital. Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, 2012, Monthly Review Press, pp.118-119.
Heinrich stresses that by increasing the productivity of labour, which is only possible by transforming the production process itself, then the value of labour power and the value of the means of subsistence can be reduced. Even so, in this situation productivity can increase, real wages can decrease, more surplus value can be appropriated by the capitalist even while a rise in the living standards of the working class has been achieved. A greater portion of the working day now consists of surplus labour. (see p.120)
Absolute and Relative surplus-value:
‘If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption.’ Marx, ‘Results of the Direct Production Process’ (MECW 34), p.429.
The dynamic emanating from the production of relative surplus value […] accelerated technical development, a rising standard of living of the working class simultaneous to rising profit) is subject, however, to a precondition not hitherto addressed: the majority of means of subsistence consumed in the working-class household have to be capitalistically produced. Heinrich, op. cit., p.121.
Heinrich indicates how this was only achieved in the 20th century. In particular Fordism illustrates the ability of capitalists to raise wages, change the consumption patterns of workers and (through constant technological improvements to the production process) see rising profits. p.121
Endnotes
[..] real subsumption brings into play the reproduction of the proletariat. […] Real subsumption establishes the systematic and historical interconnection between the reproduction of the proletariat and the the reproduction of capital. p.145
Thus TC can say:
The extraction of relative surplus-value affects all social combinations, from the labour process to the political forms of workers’ representation, passing through the integration of the reproduction of labour-power in the cycle of capital, the role of the credit system, the constitution of a specifically capitalist world market […], the subordination of science […] Real subsumption is a transformation of society and not of the labor process alone. p.145
There are many other accounts and ways of periodising this shift in historical terms.
Endnotes point out that those of Antonio Negri, Theorie Communiste, Jacques Camatte, and we could add Carlo Vercellone and many others, converge somewhat on the period of the early-1970s, with each maintaining that this moment represents a fundamental shift, yet, it cannot be that this corresponds to a beginning to real subsumption, since we would have to date that much earlier e.g. Fordism or even earlier e.g. Bourneville or numerous other examples in which capitalists attempted to model not only the production process but integrate health, education and leisure and subordinate it to the needs of production (Foxconn would indicate a parallel attempt to do this in the present).
For Negri the period after 1968 marks the “end of the centrality of the factory working class as the site of the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity”. Through the ‘total subsumption of society’ capitalist production has become diffuse and encompasses all activity – a factory without walls or social factory.
Endnotes
For TC a similar period indicates a moment of massive capitalist restructuring:
Phase 1 - 1913-18-1960s Formal and real subsumption are characterised by self-affirmation of the proletariat.
Phase 2 – 1968-1973 - Present capital as a social relation becomes more immediately internal and self-negation of the proletariat becomes the only possibility of revolution.
Carlo Vercellone:
From this results a periodisation in which three principal stages of the capitalist division of
labour and of the role of knowledge can be identified (even if these phases in part
overlap with each other).
i) The stage of formal subsumption develops between the beginning of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century. It is based on the models of production of the putting-out system6 and of centralised manufacture. The relation of capital/labour is marked by the hegemony of the knowledge of craftsmen and of workers with a trade, and by the pre-eminence of the mechanisms of accumulation of a mercantile and financial type.
ii) The stage of real subsumption starts with the first industrial revolution. The division of labour is characterised by a process of polarisation of knowledge which is expressed in the parcelling out and disqualification of the labour of execution and in the overqualification of a minoritarian component of labour power, destined to intellectual functions.7 The attempt to save time, founded on the law of value-labour, is accompanied by the reduction of complex labour into simple labour and by the incorporation of knowledge in fixed capital and in the organisation of the firm. The dynamic of capital accumulation is founded on the large factories (first of all, those of the Mancunian model, then those of Fordism), which are specialised in the production of mass, standardised goods.
iii) The third stage is that of cognitive capitalism. It begins with the social crisis of Fordism and of the Smithian division of labour. The relation of capital to labour is marked by the hegemony of knowledges, by a diffuse intellectuality, and by the driving role of the production of knowledges by means of knowledges connected to the increasingly immaterial and cognitive character of labour.8 This new phase of the division of labour is accompanied by the crisis of the law of value-labour and by the strong return of mercantile and financial mechanisms of accumulation. The principal elements of this new configuration of capitalism and of the conflicts that derive from it are, in large measure, anticipated by Marx’s notion of the general intellect. Carlo Vercellone, ‘From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism’, Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 13–36.
Temporality and limits to Periodisation
Here Endnotes make clear their differences with the above theorists:
It is evident that, with the constant revolutionising of production that occurs in real subsumption, the world beyond the immediate process of production is itself dramatically transformed. The important qualification here, however, is that these transformations occur with — or as a result of — the real subsumption of the labour process under the valorisation process: they do not necessarily constitute an aspect of real subsumption itself; nor do they define it, and indeed they may actually be considered mere effects of real subsumption. […] Nothing external to the immediate production process actually becomes capital nor, strictly speaking, is subsumed under capital. pp.148-149
Endnotes deny subsumption as a linear historical process, secondly questioning the simplistic applicability to historical development of class relations at all.
[…] according to Marx, though formal subsumption must precede real subsumption, real subsumption in one branch can also be the basis for further formal subsumption in other areas. If the categories of subsumption are applicable to history at all, this can therefore only be in a “nonlinear” fashion: they cannot apply simplistically or unidirectionally to the historical development of the class relation.
Marx himself described real subsumption as a revolution which is both ‘complete’ and ‘constantly repeated’ in the Results.
Patrick Murray argues that the terms “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption” refer first to concepts of subsumption and only secondarily — if at all — to historical stages.
Surreal Subsumption or Surreal Domination
This playful term was developed by the occasionally London-based group Melancholic Troglodytes to characterise the present coexistence of formal and real subsumption and apparent return to prior forms of primitive accumulation (direct appropriation of wealth and resources by capital-in-formation):
The Melancholic Troglodytes pick up on this dynamic, calling it ‘surreal subsumption’ – the co-existence of ‘real subsumption’ (a phase of capitalist development in which all of life becomes subject to exchange value) and ‘primitive accumulation’ (a stage in the transition to capitalism in which value is accumulated through theft or looting). From Josephine Berry Slater, Proud To Be Flesh
The surreal phase we have postulated will come to replace the real phase of capital domination. What is interesting about this emerging phase is that it consists of four methods of surplus value extraction thus giving both capital and labour more flexibility. The two common forms of surplus value extraction (formal and real) are now becoming sandwiched between two more, provisionally named the pre-formal and post-real methods of extraction. Melancholic Troglodytes, ‘Disrespecting Multifundamentalism’, in Proud To Be Flesh
Istvan Mézáros
Mézáros calls real subsumption the ‘advent of the second order of mediations’ and identifies it with a specific, but unnamed period of human history. He stresses the total subordination of social reproductive functions and relates it to the separation and subordination of use value to exchange value (this is also an important theme for Vercellone). In this sense, limitations of (human) need do not constrain the reproductive expansion of capitalism.
Capital, as such, is nothing but a dynamic, all-engulfing and dominating mode and means of reproductive mediation, articulated as a historically specific set of structures and institutionally embedded as well as safeguarded social practices. It is a clearly identifiable system of mediations which in its properly developed form strictly subordinates all social reproductive functions – from gender and family relations to material production and even to the creation of works of art – to the absolute requirement of capital expansion, i.e. of its own continued expansion and expanded reproduction as a system of social metabolic mediation. Quoted in Ricardo Antunes, Meanings of Work, 2012, p.7
Other questions:
Personification and the ‘runaway of capital’ – Camatte – Anthropomoiphism of Capital / Mézáros discusses ‘personification’, of both capital and labour (the labourer / concrete labour as mere function).
Alienation, yes – but are we anymore or less alienated than when capital first began returning our products and capacities for social labour as alien?
Questionable status of sociality under these terms and framework. Is sociality counted, or simply counted as free?
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Instead of projecting useless systems for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their unhappiness.
In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance one another (il bene ed il male economico in una nazione sempre all, istessa misura): the abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal to the want of it with others (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale alia mancanza di essi in altri): the great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active.
- G. Ortes
Sexuality and Money, Movimento Femministo, 1979
I found the suggestion that I might be happy on the market stalls where the vendor and the buyer were not different but only dressed differently. On sale besides were only an infinity of needs of the highest quality (the desire for) and of the worst production (need for). The cost was lifelong installments of the obligation to speak, my signature was not sufficient, it had to be guaranteed by the role of being a woman. A game of request and offer whose answer is always missing because it has grown up amid offers ‘born’ of questions that were not mine, that were consciously wrong, in which one always looks for the proof in favor, and this proof is history. It is the market of logic where reason never enters, where sadomasochism is a substitute for an impossible intensity, because the subjects are points of flight for anxiety, possession and power, the eroticism of diversity that declines the repetitiveness of estrangement.
The market is the only reality that can be paid. Its currency is the coin and the symbol of inexistance that become the exemplary gesture, the adjustment to the market’s rate of exchange by abstraction, where my thought has no currency.
The buying and selling of my unreality; the connotations of representation, where I am always invited to pretend myself in love or convinced of the need to marry power or dissent, culture or counter-culture, while being forced as a schizophrenic subject into the hierarchy of identification. I condemn capital while they force me to capitalize on myself, but today I know that the economy is never neutral, that time and the economic relationship are other from me, but are imposed on me as reference points to organize my defence.
Economy therefore becomes all unerasable memory, because I have to defend myself continually and affirm that I exist with recognizable gestures and thoughts that can be given a price. I am therefore forced into a humiliating battle, because the market does not yet sell feminism and I have to impose it; yet I don’t want the word of history; rather I want to be subtracted from history; except this subtraction must find a means of expression, because otherwise it is based only on the other version that, having always been definid and used as my absence, is filled by the greed of order.
I can still make recourse to pathology to criticize the norm, and I have to be careful that it is understood as sanity and not as a product of folly. I am forced into, but not converted to, emancipation, yet I must be careful that it is not a new kind of inclusion where I become a subject only because I can be assimilated.
I want to be myself but also I have to be a “movement” which expresses the political nature of a conscience that helps one to discover and manage the right to happiness and knowledge as real faculties; not as the duty to be a place recognizable for the absence of desires on part of the dominant castration, that has no rights but only codes and procedures against which I ‘must’ fight because I have a right to myself, and the ignorance of the male removal offends me with the categorical imperative of having to impose it on him.
The ‘movement’ therefore becomes the ‘currency’ of displacement which is outside economic logic, the number and suffocated mentality that finally starts to act, an open number, not so much because it accumulates but because it is ‘fluid’.
I feel no morality about this necessary currency unless it is making sure that it is not for us or amongst us that it must circulate for ever.
Nowadays I am so unromantic that I can begin to live. I am so unromantic that the “becoming woman’ talked about by the male who runs after the money of ‘his’ female part does not seduce me on the black market of alternatives. I am seduced by the gestures we do not make, the language we do not use, the fact that you and I both know so well the measures that we submit to and that we frequently offer in return, although not loving it, and that every time you present yourself with a ‘category’, my declaration of love and my political proposal is in succeeding in conjugating the verb of refusal to recognize ourselves and make us alike in that way.
The gold market has no tables for us, but it is not because of this that I do not wish to be rich with you.
This highly successful arrangement has evolved into a series of mature relationships with importers and cargo-owners, together with their third-party operators, ensuring that the very best possible supply chain solutions are specified and consistently delivered. This results in the most cost-effective options being utilised by optimising every link in the chain while, at the same time, removing any that are unnecessary.
#Eurozine - What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river
by Anthony Iles
London’s relationship to water and to the sea remains central to its role in the global economy and vital to a gamble in which the Olympics is a part, argues Anthony Iles. On the connections between shipping, logistics and the hi-speed, only apparently immaterial world of finance.
A MEMORIAL IN EXILE
Orbits of Responsibility for a War Crime from a Bosnian mine to London’s Olympic Park
On July 2 2012 London’s Olympic tower — the ArcelorMittal Orbit — will be
reclaimed as A Memorial in Exile by survivors of the Bosnian concentration
camp at Omarska, now a fully-functional mine operated by ArcelorMittal. Iron
ore and profits extracted from Omarksa have been used to manufacture
London’s newest landmark.
Details of Press Conference: Monday 2 July 2012 from 2-3pm
Location 64 Broadway, Stratford, London E15 1NG (East London Centre)
Walking commentary and view of the ArcelorMittal Orbit at Warton & Loop
Roads (Olympic Park perimeter) from 3-4pm
See map next page…
From 25 May 1992 till 22 August 1992 the Omarska mine in Prijedor, Bosnia was used as
a concentration camp by Bosnian Serb forces. At least 3,334 Bosniaks and Croats from
Prijedor were imprisoned in the Omarska camp, 700-800 were killed. Still missing in the
Prijedor region: 2, 916 men, 262 women and 11 children.
In 2004, ArcelorMittal assumed 51% of the ownership of the Ljubija mining complex that
included Omarska and resumed commercial mining operations.
In 2005, ArcelorMittal made a commitment to finance and build a memorial on the
grounds of Omarska.
Seven years on and twenty years after the war crimes committed there, still no space of
public commemoration exists.
Grounds, buildings, and equipment that were once used for the perpetration of these
crimes now serve a commercial enterprise run by the world’s largest steel producer.
On 14 April 2012, Mladen Jelača, Director of ArcelorMittal Prijedor confirmed to Professor
Eyal Weizman, of Goldsmiths, University of London and artist Milica Tomic of the
Monument Group, Belgrade, that iron ore mined at Omarska mine has been used in the
fabrication of the ArcelorMittal Orbit.
In the absence of this promised memorial and until such time that it is built, London’s
Olympic tower — the ArcelorMittal Orbit — will be reclaimed as the Omarska Memorial in
Exile.
SPEAKERS / PARTICIPANTS
Survivors from the Omarska / Prijedor camps: Satko Mujagic, Rezak Hukanovic, Kemal
Pervanic, Sudbin Music, Fikret Alic, Mirsad Duratovic
Srdjan Hercigonja, Milica Tomic, Antonia Majaca, (Four Faces of Omarska Belgrade),
Adisa Pamukcic, Susan Schuppli, Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London) and
Ed Vulliamy (journalist)
Please join our press conference and help to bring awareness to this issue. With
the Olympics fast approaching ArcelorMittal has a significant window of
opportunity to make things right!
How to find us on Monday 2 July 2012
64 Broadway, Stratford, London E15 1NG (East London Centre)
For further information please contact A Memorial in Exile through our website to receive
more information or write to us at the following email: forensic.architecture@gold.ac.uk
Additional background
Some notes from a two sections: 1. on the Zenica and Ljubija mines in Bosnia-Herzegovina 2. On ArcelorMittal and the UK, from: Greig Aitken (ed), In the Wake of Arcelor Mittal, London: CEE Bankwatch Network, 2008. Available: http://bankwatch.org/documents/mittal_local_impacts.pdf
he Zenica and Ljubija mines in Bosnia-Herzegovina War and human rights issues
One of the most attractive aspects of the Zenica plant for Mittal Steel was the presence of significant reserves of iron ore in the same country, at the Ljubija mines.20 As mentioned above, in 2004 LNM signed a joint venture agreement with RZR Ljubija (Rudnici Zeljezne Rude Ljubija) to form the company New Ljubija Mines, and to mine and develop the complex, 21 which has an annual capacity of approximately 1.5 million tonnes and reserves estimated to last 35 years.22
The Ljubija mines, however, have a dark history, which was outlined in a 2006 report by Amnesty International.23 The mines were one of the case studies in the report showing that the consequences of ethnic discrimination in employment during the war have not been addressed and that they persist in both entities of Bosnia. The problem is not confined to Ljubija and needs to be addressed much more thoroughly by the state and entity governments, however as the 51 percent owner of the Ljubija Mines, Mittal needs to develop a strategy to deal with the mines’ legacy.
Allegations concerning the mining complex during the Bosnian war include:
• Systematic dismissals of non-Serb workers. Former workers told
Amnesty International that on 22 May 1992 announcements
on the radio informed them that Bosniak and Bosnian Croat workers
must not report for work any more, and that in the following
weeks they received dismissal letters signed by the RŽR Ljubija
management. The workers who appealed against their dismissal
to the had their appeals rejected and received written communication
that they could not continue to be employed because
their position was reserved for employees of Serb ethnicity.24
• The detention of thousands of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats in
detention camps in Omarska, which is part of the Ljubija mines
complex. “Improvised detention facilities made in the Ljubija iron
ore mine” were also allegedly used, including in the main separator
in the central mining area.25
• Involvement of the war-time management of the Ljubija mines
in crimes committed during the “ethnic cleansing” campaign.26
It is not clear whether these allegations have been investigated
or whether any of the accused are still working at the mines.
• Killings at the mine complex. The International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia found that 48 people were killed in the
Ljubija iron ore mine.27 The Tribunal also found that “hundreds of
detainees were killed or disappeared in the Omarska camp between
the end of May 1992 and the end of August when the
camp was finally closed”.28 The Tribunal also found that in July
1992, more than 100 people were killed in the Omarska camp,
including people who were initially detained in the so-called
“white house”, a building which is part of the Ljubija mines complex,29
and that on 5 August at least 120 persons detained in
the Omarska camp were taken away and subsequently killed.30
• The presence of mass graves at the mines. In 1994 the UN
Commission of Experts reported that the mines in Omarska, Tomašica
and Ljubija contained a great number of bodies of victims of the
fighting in the Prijedor area, as well as of those who were killed
during detention.31 The report alleges that: “… the Serbs regularly
recruited local villagers and camp inmates to assist in disposing
of the bodies and then killed them as well so as to eliminate any
potential witnesses”.32 The report also mentions a massacre carried
out in July 1992 in room 3 of the Keraterm camp, found by
the Commission of Experts’ to have “resulted in a huge mass burial,
most likely at one of the Omarska/Tomašica mine sites”.33 In
2001, 373 bodies were reported to have been exhumed from
the mass grave of Jakarina Kosa in the Ljubija mine34. Amor
Mašovic, the head of the FBiH Commission for Missing Persons,
is reported to have stated that “there is no doubt whatsoever
that there are bodies as yet unfound within the mine of Omarska
and its vicinity […] We are not talking about dozens of bodies
here, we are talking about hundreds”.35 Former workers at the
mine testified to Amnesty International that they knew of other
former workers who were called to help bury the bodies of murdered
non-Serbs, and that they recognized some of the victims as their former
colleagues.36
No-one is arguing that Mittal Steel is responsible for any atrocities carried out at the mines, but it is clear that there are many unanswered questions which need to be approached delicately by the company, particularly as 49 per cent of the company is still owned by RZR Ljubija, and thus by the Republika Srpska government, and the role of these parties in any atrocities at the mines cannot be ruled out.
If there are still bodies in the mine complex, it would be appropriate for Mittal Steel to accord victims and their relatives the dignity of allowing excavations to take place before iron ore is mined. This is one of the demands from civil society organisation the Association of Camp Survivors from Prijedor Municipality, however this request appears to be being ignored by the relevant authorities and Mittal Steel.37 A newspaper article on the issue alleges that the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity, which would normally be expected to take an interest in the fate of non-Serb citizens, is also ignoring the issue because of its connections with Mittal Steel in Zenica.
As Amnesty International put it: “In such cases […] where economic activities may potentially destroy evidence of war crimes and crimes
against humanity or may otherwise be an impediment to the realization of the rights of the victims and the families of the victims of serious human rights violations committed during the war, it is the duty of the authorities to take all necessary steps to ensure that economic priorities do not come before justice for the victims.”38 All quotes above from pp.32-33
ArcelorMittal and the UK
Most notoriously, Mittal was seen to have bought political influence in acquiring the Galati plant in Romania when former British Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened to help Mittal steel buy the Romanian Galati steel plant a month after the tycoon donated USD 250 000 (GBP 125 000) to Blair’s party, the Labour Party. In an extraordinary letter, Mr Blair told Romania’s prime minister that selling his biggest state-owned enterprise to Lakshmi Mittal would enhance the country’s chances of joining the European Union.
p.6
Blair said he knew nothing about the donation when he signed the letter and his officials said the letter was justified on grounds of national interest. However Mittal employed only 100 people in the UK at the time and Mittal owned LNM through Richmond Investment Holdings Ltd., a company based in the British Virgin Islands, where international companies pay no taxes.7
p.12
“From our point of view we were backing the winner of a privatisation process in Romania which had a sound creditworthy proposition that we could support,” EBRD’s head of banking, Noreen Doyle, said.28 Nevertheless, the UK government found itself in an awkward situation, on one hand receiving donations from Mittal and on the other hand being part of the EBRD’s board making decisions on giving loans to Mittal.
p.14
Afterwards it was also revealed that Mittal had made another, smaller donation to the Labour Party in 1997 and just a few months afterwards the UK gave its support for the EBRD loan for Mittal’s plant - then named Ispat Karmet - in Kazakhstan.11
p.27
Greig Aitken, (ed), 2008. In the Wake of Arcelor Mittal, London: CEE Bankwatch
Network. Available: http://bankwatch.org/documents/mittal_local_impacts.pdf
Resources on the History of the Ultras and Revolt in Egypt
Here are some notes and links, written in March 2012, to material about the Port Said massacre in Egypt on 1 Feb and popular retaliation in the weeks that followed.
The reason why these events seem particularly interesting to me is that they have led to acknowledgements which seems to have blown the lid on the NGO-approved Tahrir demos-spectacle of a non-violent Egyptian ‘revolution’. They have forced a discussion on the class content of last years revolt and re-animated the energy to challenge SCAF – the Supreme Council of Armed Forces – on a mass scale. Moreover, they’ve forced parts of the movement which was content to bask in the image reflected by the western media to show solidarity across class and across tactics which distinctly muddies the shiny image projected onto it.
This link is a good summary of the way the discussion is changing:
The followers of two teams – Al-Ahly and Al Zamalek (or just Zamalek) in particular are more than familiar with police brutality on the terraces and outside the stadium - took on a key role during the anti-governnent protests of 2011, they are credited with facing off the police, then the army in defense of Tahrir Square and participating in the storming State Security headquarters and the Interior Ministry on 5 March and 22 March.
The ‘ultras’ - named after the notorious Italian football hooligan gangs - had organized for years in the face of police repression, at all the big soccer clubs. The police accused the ultras of fostering terrorism and organized crime, and they, in turn, found ways of getting their banners, flares and weapons into the stadiums. They would meet up at pre-arranged venues, ready to fight each other and the cops. On 28 January they were initially summoned to go and smash the demonstration, says Mahmoud, in response to rumours that it was organized by foreign agents:
Quote:
We came down to see what was the truth behind what the media had been telling us, and found it was all wrong. The club HQ kept telling us the protesters were traitors, foreigners, and urging the ultras to go down there and do something about it. But when we got there, to Tahrir, we formed our own opinion: we bonded with the protesters and became part of them.
End quote
Ultras from rival cub al-Ahly also joined in the fighting. By the end of the day numerous police cars had been torched, the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was on fire, and protesters controlled Tahrir Square.
Cairo’s Al-Ahly football team was formed in 1907 with specifically anti-colonial support in opposition to the then occupying British forces and in competition with the colonial team - Zamalek - whose supporters are known as the ‘White Knights’.
Since its founding in 1907, Al Ahly S.C. has been known as ‘the people’s club,’ representing resistance against the many forms of colonialism that have long plagued the African continent. Initially the first sporting club to allow Egyptians to join, Al Ahly remains the most popular of Egyptian teams, wearing to this day the red kits that honour the pre-colonial Egyptian flag.
In a statement on its Facebook page the Zamalek ultras, Ultras White Knights (UWK) called on their Ahly counterparts to declare a truce (ahead of a derby they were to play in Cairo on February 8 – which now is not going to happen because all games are suspended after the disasterous match in Port Said).
“We are asking for an end to the bloodshed and to reconcile and unite for the sake of Egypt,” the White Knights said. Ultras Ahlawy replied with a smiley – posted on their website.
On 1 Feb at the before the end of an away game against Al-Masry in which Al-Ahly were loosing 3-1, Al-Ahly players and fans were attacked by what appeared to be Al-Masry fans invading the pitch (there had been violence on the way to the game, as well as several attempted pitch invasions and exchanges of fireworks and missiles between fans earlier in the game).
In the ensuing chaos, scores died. The majority seem to have been trampled as they ran for an exit door which was welded. Others fell or were thrown from the terraces. Some were killed as a result of direct attacks. According to reports, the security forces stood around and refused to intervene. By the end of the day 74 were dead, including fans from both sides.
In particular these two statements from witnesses (an Ahlawy ultra and two Al-Masry players) inside the stadium give a sense of the confusion and the likelihood of a conspiracy being carried out:
What happened in Port Said as told by @Heemalization (UA07 Ahly Ultras)
Quote:
From day one we’re trying to calm people down, and we knew a problem would happen. We kept repeating that we made a statement and this time is too critical for any of that; and many of the older members of the UA07 (Ahly Ultras) were telling the younger ones to maintain self control.
Out train was thrown by rocks in Ismailia and that we were used to. It is the norm for the train or bus to be attacked when it is on its way from one province to another. The train broke down so we went down in a train station in “Al Cap” before Port Said in order to ride buses that will take us to Port Said because we knew that they prepared an ambush for us at the train station.
We got to Port Said from the buses entrance area and the rock throwing on the buses hasn’t stopped all the way to the stadium. All of this was still very normal and happens whenever we travel.
On our way into the stadium we heared that the “Masry” (Port Said team) fans attacked the Ahly players’ bus and injured Said Muawad with fireworks. In the first half of the match both parties (Ahly Ultras) and (Masry fans) were chanting hostile slogans as usual and then they started exchanging fireworks.
We started seeing “Masry” fans break into the stadium very easily from many sides of it; it increased after the first half of the game and they threw missiles at us. The only thing the police did was take them away without arresting any of those that the missiles on the “Ahly” fans. The missiles kept coming our way throughout the whole second half.
The moment the referee whistled to declare the ending of the game, the pitch was attacked in a very bizarre way from two sides; one towards the players to hit them and the other towards the “Ahly” fans in the bleachers. At this very same moment the lights went off and the stadium turned black, at that time there were two CSF security cordons along the “Ahly” bleachers and all of a sudden the cordon was opened for the “Masry” fans to go up the bleachers and attack the “Ahly” fans.
They went from the bleachers’ bottom doors that were open and went up very easily in huge numbers; not less than 2000/3000. We were in shock that the police let them do that very easily and that such large numbers are attacking us! Usually it would be swearing, fireworks and rock-throwing; it is what we do in football but that is it!
The people attacking us were armed with batons, knives, rocks, glass, fireworks and all kinds of weapons that would be used in more than a football trouble.
When we saw these numbers we knew we wouldn’t be able to deal with all of them; so we started running towards the hallways that take us to the doors in order to exit the stadium. These hallways should’ve been opened for us to leave but they were closed by the army from the outside. The area between the doors of these hallways and the main exit gates had army soldiers and we were locked in. Not even able to escape. We were besieged in the hallway and we had two choices; either die inside or outside because even if were able to make it outside the people of Port Said were waiting for us there at the main gate.
90% of the “Ahly” fans were crammed in the 6*6*10 meter; they were crammed layers on top of each other and there is no other exit and from the other side the “Masry” fans beating up everyone in their way, even the ones that fell that entirely taking place on our bleachers. It wasn’t only hitting, no. It was hitting and stealing especially phones, money and the UA07 shirts and the numbers of people in the hallways kept increasing.
Although, not everyone went down into that hallway, some people tried to jump over the fence either because they were pushed or scared. The door of the hallways fell because of all the pushing and many as people started coming out a lot of stampeding and running over others was taking place. A group went to the players’ locker room and I saw a dead man before my eyes. The people started saving each other because there was no ambulance; everyone was eventually out after about an hour.
The fool was basically made up of shoes, bags, batons, t-shirts and the fiber ceiling of the hallway was broken and fell. The interference of the CSF started taking place after 20 minutes of the riots’ start after people were already dead and after “Masry” fans started running away. After all that the army started shooting in the air on the outside in order to disperse the “Masry” fans that were waiting outside for the “Ahly” fans to come out.
Most injuries are fractures, wounds and burns from the rocks, glass and fireworks and many suffocation cases most of it being deaths.
What happened today is either planned or has been facilitated, there is no other scenario it was a lot more than just football troubles that all the Ultras and football fans know about. What I saw today was worse than what I saw in Mohammed Mahmoud, all that happened was above anyone’s imagination.
On our way back in the train people were insisting that what happened was planned and the unharmed of us was chanting at every station against the police.
We as a whole (UA07) will make our decision and make a statement on our official facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/UltrasAhlawyCom
“In the last minutes, everyone was concentrating on the game. But as soon as the final whistle was blown, the door of the level-three stand was open, so people didn’t need to jump. They simply came down out of an open door. Tell me, who opened it? And where was the security? It drives me crazy! There was actually no army there, really. And if you look carefully at the videos, you’ll see that the people who went onto the pitch went all the way from one side of the stadium to the other, where the Ahly fans were. These people were the thugs. But we didn’t know it was going to elevate that much, so were told to go into the changing rooms, as you’d expect.”
M. Zekri: “For the first time in history, tickets weren’t being checked, there was no searching, and the governor and police chief didn’t attend…”
“I felt something was going wrong, and these things were also confirmed to me. Firstly, there was no real searching of fans as they entered the stadium, which is really unusual. In the past, nobody could go in with a plastic water bottle. This half-hearted searching was two hours before kick-off too, but one hour before kick-off, whoever wanted to go in could just go in, whether you had a ticket or not. Tickets weren’t being checked, and there was no searching at all. Some people I met had gone in and out of the stadium with the ticket still looking perfect inside their pockets! And another thing, for the first time in the history of our town, the governor and chief of police did not attend this game.
Karim: “Well, we’d left our changing rooms and gone to the Ahly players’ changing rooms to make sure they were ok, and there, we saw the disaster. I found corpses on the floor, and most of the deaths were from suffocation. People were squashed together and ended up dying that way. I went out of the changing rooms to help the Ahly fans get out. The floodlights had been switched off – we found out later, that this happened as soon as we’d gone in – and this was one of the main causes of the disaster because people stamped on each other. I found people on the floor and I kept taking as many out of the stadium as I could and returning. The strange thing is that, really, there were no police in the stands or in the player’s tunnel where I was taking them out from.”
Karim: “Afterwards, we found out that the gate of the away stand was completely welded in advance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cejiVFI_Uqw&), so the Ahly fans were squashed to death. And the other door, which away fans usually leave from, was closed on the Ahly fans by the police.”
Mohamed: “And I have many friends who were in the stadium, and they swear to me that the police were saying to them, ‘go and beat the s**t out of them – they’re saying you’re not men’. They’re the ones who stirred the people up, and they opened the Ahly stand from the pitch-side. This gate, it is not allowed to be opened under any circumstances. It’s different to the gate that was locked so that Ahly fans couldn’t get out, which is the gate that the fans come into the stadium from. So, when they saw the thugs coming, the Ahly fans ran towards this gate and couldn’t get out, and that’s when the stampede occurred. And let me ask you, if Masry fans are the ones who killed, how could 21 of the Masry fans die? There may have been a few animalistic idiots who joined in with the thugs, but I mean just a few. I’m telling you the truth as would please God.”
Mohamed: “Listen, Ahly’s Ultras, they all said, “Down, down, military rule” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6AWIQA8zDY) in the Arab Contractors match, and my personal opinion before disagreed with them, because the military will hand over power after three months and we need to be patient. But the Ultras were right, because they said the military won’t hand it over and will wreck the country before they do, and nobody believed them. But after what I saw with my eyes from the government, I believe them.
Karim: “Today (Friday), a man was arrested and he confessed about two others. He said that there were more than 600 people hired from outside Port Said, who entered the game. They’d taken money from one of the sacked National Democratic Party members, called Al-Husseini Abu-Qamar, and he was a personal friend of Gamal Mubarak. He told them to kill and cause havoc in the stadium, and now everyone is searching for him. Thanks to God, the truth is showing day by day.”
Aftermath
Samir Zaher, chairman of the Egyptian Football Association, decided tonight to suspend indefinitely Egypt’s Premiere League in response to incident.
Al-Ahly star Mohamed Aboutreika, immediately announced his retirement after the match.
Parliament decided to hold extraordinary session Thursday morning to discuss the events.
In a statement posted by the Masry Ultras Green Eagles on their Facebook page, the group assured that they were committed to peacefully support their team and prevent any infiltrators from reaching their ranks: “Our group has nothing to do with what happened. We shall stop our activities as the Masry Ultras Green Eagles in respect to those who were killed for Egypt,” The statement also called for a march to protest the violence and demand an end to military rule.
‘Activists, politicians see more than hooliganism in football violence’:
Follow up protests on Wednesday and Thursday (spontaneous in Port Said and Cairo) Friday (organised and national) continuing over the weekend
On Thursday Al-Ahly supporters regrouped in Misr Station in Ramses (Cairo), station chanting: “The people demand the execution of the Field Marshal (Tantawi).” Video: http://youtu.be/86Xu_lH_EVQ
Hundreds blocked the Nile Corniche in front of the Maspero state television building. Relatives and friends of the victims marched to the TV building from Cairo’s Ramses train station, where they had been waiting for fans returning from Port Said. At the station, nearly 10,000 Al-Ahly Ultras received their fellow fans early Thursday, and demanded the head of the ruling military council, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, be executed.
Ahly fans were accompanied by supporters of their arch-rival, Zamalek, at the protest, and all chanted slogans against the SCAF and Tantawi. Thousands of demonstrators from nearby Tahrir Square also joined the protest, which halted traffic in front of Maspero. Dozens of Ahly Ultras also marched in the square itself, chanting angrily and demanding retribution for their dead comrades.
On friday 3 Feb Protests started with a march from Al-Ahly’s headquarters to the area outside the ministry building near Tahrir Square.
Security forces guarding the area were separated from protesters by concrete blocks and barbed wire, but tensions rose as protesters advanced toward them, removing some of the barriers and hurling stones. Police responded with tear gas, sending demonstrators running. There were reports last night that gunshots had also been heard.
In scenes reminiscent of the clashes with police in November which left 40 people dead, protesters set tyres alight and motorcycles ferried some of those wounded to hospital as ambulances were unable to get through. Egyptian state TV said 100 people had passed out from the tear gas. The Interior Ministry said in a statement that the protesters had cut the barbed wire and crossed over the concrete blocks to reach the roads leading to the headquarters.
The Friday protests spread to other cities in a coordinated uprising against SCAF nationwide.
At least nine people have been killed in clashes in Egypt, as protesters fought with security forces over their alleged failure to prevent deadly football riots on Wednesday.
Six people died in the eastern port city of Suez, as police used live rounds to hold back crowds on Friday.
Three protesters were also killed in the capital, Cairo, as crowds broke down walls and barbed wire barriers to reach the heavily guarded interior ministry. Police fired birdshot and salvos of tear gas. One soldier was killed when a riot police truck backed into him, the government said.
According to the state health ministry, more than 2,500 people were wounded in the Cairo clashes.
In southern Egypt, 11 people were injured in protests outside the security directorate and police station in Minya governorate.
In Alexandria, Egypt’s coastal second city, tear gas and fireworks were traded between security forces and protesters into the night outside the main security directorate.
In al-Marg, armed men attacked a police station and freed detainees after setting the station on fire, state-owned al-Ahram newspaper reported.
Egypt’s ruling generals have deployed additional soldiers and tanks across the country in preparation for the anniversary of former president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster from power on 11 February.
[…]
More patrols will be deployed across the country to “maintain the security … of public, private and state buildings,” said a statement issued by the ruling military council on Wednesday.
Lieutenant General Sami Enan, the armed forces chief of staff, urged Egyptians to “protect the security and stability of the country through work and production,” the state news agency MENA reported.
Video about the tie-up of military and industry ownership: http://youtu.be/gEJA3tGwkp4
Political ramifications
The deep state’s bomb blows up in its face, the Muslim Brotherhood shift position and the pressure builds on SCAF to speed up transition to parliamentary rule.
Wednesday’s violence came right after SCAF head Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi gave a speech saying he would limit the use of Emergency Law to acts of thuggery. It also comes one day after Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim spoke at parliament proselytizing on the merit of emergency laws. Many linked the match violence to these statements in a regime quest to showcase the relevance of the Emergency Law, of which abolishment has been one of the main demands of the revolutionaries since January 2011.
“What happened cannot be a coincidence. This massacre and three armed robberies happened only one day after Ibrahim tried to talk to us about the need for a state of emergency,” Ziad al-Elaimy, an MP with the Social Democratic Party said in a television interview.
Until yesterday, the top concern in Cairo was the mounting tension between revolutionary protesters and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) now controls 46 per cent of parliament and is in a position to negotiate – alone if it wants to – the terms by which the military will transfer power to civilians later this year. The protest movement wants an immediate handover of power, either to a senior judge as interim president, to parliament, or to a president to be elected as soon as possible – and certainly earlier than 15 June, the date the generals have set for a presidential election. The Brothers, along with the more hardline Salafi Islamists, were sticking with the military schedule, but what happened last night has changed that.
In a special session of parliament today, the idea of forming a government of national salvation was discussed. MPs, including those of the FJP, also want to sack the interior minister and interrogate the chief of intelligence. It is as yet unclear whether they have the power – legally or practically – to do this, and what it might mean for the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). But it is a first sign of confrontation between the Brothers and the SCAF, and is encouraging the Tahrir protesters to hold fast to their demand for accountability and civilian rule sooner rather than later.
Class composition, violence and non-violence
That the massacre at Port Said and protests following have exposed a more complicated class dimension to the ‘Egyptian Revolution’ has now become a commonplace. Here, what is clearly an intense dialogue about tactics, violence and non-violence which has been going on inside the revolt and on the street has bubbled to surface in mainstream discourse. Moreover, certain aspects of the composition of the crowd in Tahrir, on the Egyptian street and in the stadiums can be gleaned. Some sources suggest that the ultras movement styled itself on similar European phenomena and that Ultras organisations were started by internet-savvy, educated unemployed and then gained a mass and proletarian following, (see: http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/ultras-and-military-dangerous-games), but sometimes this is confused with the April 6 movement who have attracted widespread criticism for visiting Serbia to bring ‘Orange revolution’ style tactics to the Middle East. Elsewhere, as cited at the beginning of this post, a longer trajectory is given of politicisation and mobilisation around football in Egypt and thus it was a natural springboard for organising as the Arab spring gained momentum. What’s clear is that 1. Al-Ahly and Zamalek ultras are well organised online and off and are also now self-reflexive about their dialogue with pro-revolutionaries post-Mubarak, issuing public statements and organising as widely as possible in the protests that followed Port Said. 2. More material is surfacing which gives some space and agency to actors such as subproletarian marginals known as ‘harafish’ rather than the middle-class activists who seemed to have the western medias ear. 3. Ultras played a vital role in the Tunisian revolts (see:http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38379/), Egyptian and Tunisian ultras were in contact (see: http://www.thenational.ae/sport/football/how-al-ahly-and-zamalek-buried-enmity-to-topple-hosni-murbarak#page2), as I cite below a source which posed football fans as central to popular proletarian revolts in Iran, it’s quite possible that the phenomenon could be considered widespread and growing across the middle east. As ever there’s every reason to be suspicious of narratives which highlight uncritically the ‘internet’ or the influence of western social movements. These carry the traditional blinkers of a habitual orientalism with which the west views the middle east and with which sometimes the middle east views itself.
Whilst I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the ultras here, this is an excellent post on organised workers as another decisive factor in the 2011 revolt and revolts of the future:
Ali was a house painter who supplemented his meager income by doing random jobs in his neighborhood. He is an example how popular perceptions of the revolutionaries have been skewed, so that the martyrs are idealized as educated, internet-savvy, white-collar types.
This perception is encouraged and utilized by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to discredit protesters, such as during the November battles on Mohamed Mahmoud Street and the December clashes in front of the cabinet building. In their press briefings after these violent events, the SCAF claimed that the protesters were actually thugs.
Under pressure over the continuation of emergency laws – SCAF has recently begun to insist that it reserves the right to use exceptional measures only when dealing with ‘thugs’ (i.e. ‘“harafish,” youth with no prospects who often skirt the edge of the law’. The unemployed and working class)Thus they are attempting to find an advantage by dividing the protestors along class lines.
“The power of this revolution came from these harafish burning police stations and from the collapse of the Interior Ministry. That was utilized by the political elites who centralized the struggle in Tahrir Square. Without this confrontation, the revolution wouldn’t have been possible, and every police station was burnt to the ground because people have been dying inside them for years. There is a veneer of nonviolence but no one saw the battles in Suez and elsewhere — How is it peaceful when people are dying in the streets?” Bashir says
This section in particular gets into a much more nuanced tactics of violence:
People don’t understand what nonviolent resistance means,” Bashir continues. “It means not taking up arms and revolting, like what happened in Libya and Yemen, where uprisings began like the one in Egypt but people eventually took up arms. It doesn’t mean not responding to violence.
“Let’s not forget what happened in the days between 25 January and 28 January, this glossed over part of history,” he says. “There were constant clashes in Omraneya for example, and there were people in Talbiya trying to get to the Foreign Ministry. The fighting continued long after the political elite were tear-gassed out of the square on 25 January”
However, Abdel-Rahman Samir from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition:
We won some media solidarity but we lost sympathy from citizens. Last January we lost a lot of lives, but we didn’t win by attacking the Interior Ministry — we won by staying in the square. When you are attacked but remain peaceful you manage to get more support on the streets, and this creates greater pressure.
Where do these tactics come from?
Samir says that nonviolent resistance is the most successful revolutionary method, and prior to January 2011 some young revolutionaries studied the examples of countries such as Chile where nonviolent resistance was successful. Members of the April 6 Youth Movement faced heavy criticism for attending a workshop in Serbia about how to peacefully overthrow dictatorial regimes
Lastly, a few commentators have drawn attention to the importance of humour in the Ultras movement and this I think deserves much more emphasis than I’ve given space to here. Irreverance with regards to authority is one of the main hallmarks of ultras and ‘fans’ worldwide, this is a form of violence done to power which is both infectious and extremely hard to repress with the given resources of the state and military. Egypt’s ultras may yet point the way for a population otherwise trapped between the present brutal rule of the Army and the likely transition to the sober and business-friendly Muslim Brotherhood. Ashram El-Sharif, ‘The ultras’ politics of fun confront tyranny’: http://www.egyptindependent.com/node/636546
Further reading
There’s a good blog on football culture across the Middle East by James Dorsey: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer
http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.com/
Mohamed Gamal Beshir, quoted above as ‘Bashir’(who tweets as “Gemyhood”), has published a book popular with Egypt’s ultras (presumably only in arabic for the time being): “The Ultras Book,” http://www.egyptindependent.com/node/634376
For people who are interested in continuing to follow these events and follow-up connections people are beginning to make internationally there’s a tag on twitter #ultras where a lot more info and (during the busy days following Port Said, calls for demos were posted). The most recent demo commemorating the Port Said ‘martyrs’ took place yesterday (1/03/2012).
Two other sources which encouraged me having a deeper look into the ultras phenomenon:
Mastaneh Shah-Shuja, Zones of Proletarian Development, London, 2008 (Shah-Shuja is a cohort/consort of Melancholic Troglodytes) which has a long chapter on a series of Iranian football riots which spiralled into widespread disorder in 1999-2000.
Terraces & Peripheries: Left Snobbery & the Radical Right
by Emilio Quadrelli, 24 November 2006
Mute published this a while back and whilst it didn’t cause much debate at the time I hope the material I’ve collected above shows that in many ways recent praxis in Egypt answers Quadrelli’s call of frustration appropriately.
It’s late. The sick yellow streetlights illuminate his way as Gav crouches and crawls crab-like chalking an egg shape around the perimeter of Tesco supermarket. The base of the egg forms a neat semicircle cutting through the car park, crossing and bisecting the gridded outlines of the parking spaces. The shape Gav has drawn is not immediately apparent from the grounds of the supermarket, but its arc is enough to hint at a call to assembly. Tracing the southern circumference next to a bus stop on Roman Road, Gav has scrawled the word EGGJA in well-spaced capital letters.
Once he’s done, Gav legs it to the Pinnacles knowing that from the roof he’ll have the best position to check his work. Entering through the basement fire exit stairwell and running up the unfinished concrete steps, he stops by the penthouse flat to drag Rag out of his early evening K-hole. The pair of friends stand on the roof of the apartment block admiring Gav’s drawing. The outline of the egg is more or less visible, circumventing three sides of the supermarket building. Lines cross the tightly confined plant beds running up walls and onto the pavement again only to curve and converge in a point at the back of the 10ft security fence which encloses the plastic refuse skips. The same skips into which residents of Pan’s Court dive each evening searching for edibles. Gav proudly pronounces the written word, ‘EGGJA… EGGJA. It’s Icelandic for to incite, to sharpen, we use it in the sense of to egg someone on. Nice, eh?’ Rag, reluctant to follow Gav’s drift into familiar pedantry, stiffles any admiration, and grins turning to him, ‘You is a good egg mate.’ Then patting him on the shoulder in mock military formality, ‘So, what’s it all in aid of? I mean what’s going off? I’ve seen loonies and black block types turning up at Pan’s Court all week. Tell me please you’re not the captain of all this?’ Expecting something like this, Gav is ready with his response: ‘Absolutely not. I only went to the first meeting to find out the date of the action. Some of the kids have been coming to Ayanna’s workshops, I’ve been throwing some ideas around, but that’s it. The rest is up to the kids – that’s my contribution right there, incitement and sharpening, that’s all. Now let’s get some kip ready for the morning’s fireworks.’
Gav and Rag sleep up on the roof warmed by blankets, red wine and Adolfo’s weed. There’s activity throughout the night over at Pan’s Court with small parties of two or three making short runs back and forth between the occupied building and Tesco, sometimes dropping small bags of tools and materials in the verges surrounding the supermarket, sometimes venturing into the fenced refuse yard for reconnaissance purposes. At dawn the pair wake up, well aware that this is going to be a special day. Everyone is ready.
A group, apparently dressed as druids, form a semicircle on the lawn in the central courtyard of Pan’s Court. For the last two weeks they’ve been collecting packing boxes from IKEA, Tesco and Habitat from the basement of the building and surrounding bins and skips. From these, the druids have built large crude models of skyscrapers, signature modernist and postmodernist buildings. These buildings are lined up against the East horizon from which the sun will soon rise. The druids kneel facing the horizon making incantations before the miniature skyline.
At midday a group of dancers begins to weave its way from the courtyard of Pan’s Court, crossing the bridge over the canal in single file. The dancers move to the sounds pumping out of a fridge on improvised rollers rigged up with two active speakers, a generator and an iPod gaffer-taped to its side. The sound system pumps out Baile Funk, Kuduru, Senegalese and Ivory Coast Rap; the dancers carry djembes, whistles and coloured plastic horns. Some of them have costumes, cheaply produced imitations of those worn at Notting Hill Carnival. They are accompanied by a small crew of tramps who wave cans of Polish lager and sometimes join the fray spinning, stumbling and leering. A few of the dancers stand by, at the back, keeping the tramps away from the children’s part of the procession, whilst the dancers at the front are happy to play to the tramps, shaking hips, arses and breasts. only to lurch away again and back into formation. It might be called a procession but it’s pretty chaotic and formless until it reaches the destination.
As the crowd snakes up the steps onto Roman Road and into Tesco’s car park, a troupe of eight choreographed dancers slip into formation and begin to prance forward crouching and shaking their hands at their sides, then clasping their arms to their chests before falling and rolling on the floor in mock agony. The moves are part of the Bird Flu dance, popular in the Ivory Coast. The troupe has been learning the steps over the past month from videos on YouTube. DJ Lewis’ signature track, ‘Grippe Aviare’, booms out followed by M.I.A.’s ‘Bird Flu’, as the procession led by the eight dancers advances towards the main entrance of the supermarket.
While the dancers continue to cast shapes on the asphalt of the car park, a second procession, dressed sombrely in black jeans, T-shirts and hoodies enters from the left, marching parallel to the long front of the building’s facade. These skinny, pale, tattooed and pierced teenagers make up the self-styled VEGAN MARTYRS BRIGADE: a parodic tribute to the suicidal militancy of some Islamist and Leftist groups. At the front two kids hold a banner aloft, ‘THE BLOODY HAMPER’, behind them another banner proclaims ‘ALL IS LABOUR – ALL IS FLESH’ and between these two banners members of the brigade are armed with rocks, crowbars and baseball bats. Near the back a crew pushes trolleys stocked with breeze-blocks, flags, and balloons filled with lemon curd, jam, honey and red paint. At the entrance to the supermarket two security guards stand, one a nervous white guy on his radio with his colleague, a thickset Ghanaian, both staring at the dancers twitching lightly now and then in time with the rhythm. It’s already too late when the two security guards notice the second block, who by now are already at the entrance. The security guards simply step back out of the way as the front-line steps towards them to let in the block and the trolleys. Four members of the VEGAN MARTYRS BRIGADE nonchalantly escort the security guards through the car park and into the smoking shelter provided for supermarket staff where they will hold them for the duration of the attack.
Inside the supermarket the VEGAN MARTYRS BRIGADE are joined by members of the POTLATCH BLOCK who until then had been milling about inside posing as shoppers. Once the security guards are taken care of, both groups begin to raid the shelves. Empty trolleys are filled with meat products: whole chickens are brought out and thrown to the dancers in the car park. In the frozen food section, tomato and ruby orange juices are poured into the freezer cabinets until the aisle resembles a mortuary scene. Once their trolleys are full with packaged flesh, the VEGAN MARTYRS BRIGADE ram-raid the meat counter smashing its glass front and covering the delicatessen with paint and detritus. They go on attacking the cash tills and spraying graffiti on the walls behind the counter until the entire section is wrecked.
A group from the POTLATCH BLOCK produce tablecloths and fold-out tables and place them in the aisle, and adorning the tables with candles, cheeses and fine wines, they invite panicked shoppers and cash till attendants to picnic at Tesco’s expense. The rest of the POTLATCH BLOCK continues to go to work on the shelves; at first emptying, then re-stocking them with all manner of bizarre fetishes, both ready-made, and fashioned from combinations of materials from the supermarket with objects they have brought with them in rucksacks. Potatoes are pierced with pencils to resemble naval mines, courgettes are wrapped in the gold foil removed from Easter Egg packaging, sliced disks of aubergine are fashioned into coins with gold and silver marker pens, advocados are scooped out, their skins packed with mince, and all this is heaped back onto the shelves. Once the vegetable rack is emptied, members of the POTLATCH BLOCK erect an effigy of gross fecundity personified: the EGG LADY. She’s huge, with gauche ketchup make-up, covered top to bottom with fresh eggs, plants and drenched in milk from the dairy section. Wax, ribbons and saffron liberally drip from her pumpkin head, and at her feet joss sticks scorch the paper plastered over her chicken wire frame.
Twenty minutes into this intense flurry of activity police begin to arrive.
Upon a signal from the entrance, the VEGAN MARTYRS BRIGADE make a hasty exit, sabotaging the vast generators at the rear of the supermarket, setting fire to bins, then wheeling them into Roman Road to give them enough time to split up and disappear. Inside the supermarket there is so much confusion between the ordinary shoppers now turned looters, estate kids who have turned up specifically to loot, and the remaining members of the POTLATCH BLOCK still stuffing their faces and filling the shelves with mess, that few arrests can be made. The police try to restore order by pushing everyone, staff included, out of the supermarket. They are pelted with eggs and fruit by bystanders, but otherwise meet little resistance. Many shoppers leave with basketfuls and even trolleys of goods indifferent to whether or not they have been paid for.
The Forest hung from a tree
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
The forest hung from a tree
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
The forest hung from a tree
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
The forest hung from a tree
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
The forest hung from a branch
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
Far from falling at the foot of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH rises
The forest hung from a branch
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
Far from falling at the foot of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH rises
The head of the word BRANCH
rises to the head of the word TREE
and BARS it
The forest hung from a branch
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
Far from falling at the foot of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH rises
The head of the word BRANCH
rises to the head of the word TREE
and BARS it
The block of the surface of the word EARTH
which, drunk with wood, ERRS without a T
in the tempest of the word VERSE without a head
The forest hung from a branch
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
Far from falling at the foot of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH rises
The head of the word BRANCH
rises to the head of the word TREE
and BARS it
The block of the surface of the word EARTH
which, drunk with wood, ERRS without a T
in the tempest of the word VERSE without a head
No head of a word falls
no head, no fall
in the shadow of the tree without shadow or prey
The forest hung from a branch
hides the tree from the hanged man
and the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
Far from falling at the foot of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH rises
The head of the word BRANCH
rises to the head of the word TREE
and BARS it
The block of the surface of the word EARTH
which, drunk with wood, ERRS without a T
in the tempest of the word VERSE without a head
No head of a word falls
no head, no fall
in the shadow of the tree without shadow or prey
Axe without head “or handle”
planted in the wood of the edge
the word PREY without head or tail
kills the word KING in its body and its soul
its trap and its number
The forest hung from a branch
hides the tree from the hanged man in the tree
Hung from the highest branch
the original forest
sticks out its original tongue
of its uninitialed CRIMES
At the heart of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH
chopped off
Lost head
errant heart
Far from falling at the foot of the word TREE
the head of the word BRANCH rises
The head of the word BRANCH
rises to the head of the word TREE
and BARS it
The block of the surface of the word EARTH
which, drunk with wood, ERRS without a T
in the tempest of the word VERSE without a head
No head of a word falls
no head, no fall
in the shadow of the tree without shadow or prey
Axe without head “or handle”
planted in the wood of the edge
the word PREY without head or tail
kills the word KING in its body and its soul
its trap and its number
The word EDGE at the heart of the word FOREST
without beginning or end
From Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey, Contra Mundum Press, 2012.
Attending a lecture yesterday night at Swedenborg Hall someone posed the question of whether philosophy was, for Laruelle, the ‘opium of the masses’. ‘No’, Laruelle countered, ‘philosophy is the opium of intellectuals … it’s stronger than cannabis… Badiou is heroin’
Mattin Unconstituted Praxis
Release of the publication
To follow up the exhibition « Noise & Capitalism-exhibition as concert » realised CAC Brétigny, 1 september -30 october 2010 the center present « Unconstituted Praxis » a publication realised as part of the exhibition by Mattin in collaboration with Loïc Blairon, Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Esther Ferrer, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Anthony Iles, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Jarrod Fowler, Taku Unami, Zibigniew Karkowski & Evil Moisture, Diego Chamy, « »[sic] TIM GOLDIE, Malin Arnell, Ilya Lipkin, Barry Esson, Loty Negarty, David Baumflek, Daniel Lichtman, Maija Timonen, Anne Duffau et qui regroupe des contributions de addlimb, Billy Bao, Marcia Bassett, Janine Eisenaecher, Ludwig Fischer, Michel Henritzi, Alessandro Keegan, Alexander Locascio, Loty Negarti, Jérôme Noetinger, Andrij Orel & Roman Pishchalov, Acapulco Rodriguez, Benedict Seymour, Julien Skrobek, Taumaturgia and Dan Warburton.
The following paper, presented at the Historical Materialism conference in London, 2011, forms a sketch of three terms. Effectively for this initial presentation I will focus upon ‘autonomisation’. Autonomisation or autonomization is a term I first encountered in Frederic Jameson’s work, specifically his article ‘Culture and Finance Capital’. However the term also appears in the writings of French left-communist Jacques Camatte and French theorists of communisation, Théorie Communiste.
For me the word Autonomisation has two significant insights, the first is related to the continuity of capitalist form from Fordism to Financialisation (via Taylorism). The second pertains to what Harry Braverman calls ‘habituation’ and that which breaks with it. Both of these points of interest will be related to debates in aesthetics and the reason for this is: that contrary to discourses around political autonomy, these aesthetic debates emphasise and work through labour and humankind’s determination under capitalism (it’s unfreedom / it’s alienation) finding their exit through it, not outside of it.
In Jameson’s writings the term appears in similar sections in Brecht and Method (1998) and The Prison-House of Language (1972), (on Structuralism and Russian Formalism). Drawing upon Harry Braverman’s study, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Jameson, attempting to develop a theory of ‘modernist formal processes’, poses Modernism as a cultural response to an intensification of ‘reification’ (as was realism before it) (Sadly here I’ll not have time to introduce Gillian Rose’s critique of this term, ‘reification’, as analysed in her text ‘The Lament over Reification’). Jameson:
I found it interesting and productive to see this particular process in terms of autonomization: what were formerly parts of a whole become independent and self-sufficient. It is something that can be observed in the chapters and their subepisodes in Ulysses, and also in the Proustian sentence. I wanted to establish a kinship here, not so much with the sciences […], but with the labor process itself. And here the great phenomenon of Taylorization (contemporaneous with modernism) slowly imposes itself: a division of labor (theorized as long ago as Adam Smith) now becoming a method of mass production in its own right by way of the separation of different stages and their reorganization around principles of efficiency. Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ p.256
Perhaps rather than literature, an arguably more straightforward aesthetic work through which to imagine the correspondance between Talorisation and modernism, is the Tiller Girls as described by Seigfried Kracauer. These mass spectacles of drilling ‘girl-units’ are:
[…] conceived according to rational principles which the Taylor system merely pushes to their ultimate conclusion. The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls […] The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires. Kracauer, pp.78-79.
Taylorism is central to Braverman’s study of the development of the labor process through the 20th century. This is because he believes: ‘Taylorism […] is nothing less than the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production.’ Harry Braverman, p.86. Taylorism does not describe a period or phase of capitalist organisation of production, but rather it is it’s very continuity, ‘if Taylorism does not exist as a separate school today, that is because, apart from the bad odor of the name, it is no longer the property of a faction, since its fundamental teachings have become the bedrock of all work design.’ Braverman, p.87. For Braverman, at some point in the early 20th Century, Taylorism became generalised. The fact that Taylor’s techniqes became known in German simply as ‘rationalisation’ will give you some sense of the continuity with which it applied in our present moment – to the labour process and organisation of work (and arguably even unwaged-work) from Academic work, to service work in Pret A Manger (tasks are measured, an economy of input and output is established, targets are created and extended, decision-making is centralised, costs are cut). Moreover, the paucity of an understanding and critique of Taylor’s innovations are bourne out when Braverman discusses Lenin’s enthusiastic adoption of Taylor’s techniques. Given more time we could also discuss the adoption or worse, distanced admiration, amongst the French left under the popular front, later pro-Vichy syndicalists and even in Anarchist Spain (see Jaques Rancière, pp.169-170 and Anson Rabinbach, pp.272-275).
In his development of the analogy with the assembly line; the separation of processes, breaking ever further into discreet units of production, Jameson cites two key figures, Bertolt Brecht and Viktor Shklovsky. Each, in different ways, had explored developments of perception and apperception (that is the perception of perception e.g. Brecht: ‘showing has to be shown’) in art by formulating what we could call homeopathic responses to alienated experience under capitalism. (I won’t have time to problematise ‘alienation’, but I think there are friends here present who might develop discuss).
Brecht had famously formulated a set of techniques in the theatre he summed up as the Verfremdungseffekt. Though most commonly known in English as the alienation effect, Verfremdungseffekt can be rendered as alienation (John Willett etc.), detachment (Willett’s preference), distanciation (French), or estrangement effect. Though Entfremdung – Alienation (in the sense Hegel and Marx use it) is close enough for Brecht to have once or twice used the earlier term in the same sense as the latter (Willett, p.220) Brecht’s derivation of the term is most likely an adoption of the concept of Ostranenie used commonly by Russians Brecht met in Moscow and Berlin, (Sergei Tretiakov and Sergei Eisenstein). The term was developed by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Priëm Ostranenniya or ostranenie or ostranit’ (verb) can be rendered as: defamiliarisation, estrangement, making strange (or making it strange – making things strange).
Shklovsky speaks of ostranenie as a process or act that endows an object or image with ‘strangeness’ by ‘removing’ it from the network of conventional, formulaic, stereotypical perceptions and linguistic expressions (based on such perceptions). From the Translator’s Introduction, Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, [Trans. Benjamin Sher], Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2009, p.xix.
Shklovsky, ‘Art as a device’
[…] in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make the stone stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious’. The perceptual process in art has a purpose all of its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, p.6.
Ostranenie is a neologism, and this is important for Shklovsky’s thought in that, even for Russians, it would demand exactly the special effort of imagination that the device is intended to engender. The tradition of Russian Formalism in which Shklovsky worked, insisted that literature amounted to an hermetic system, containing it’s own formal logic and rigor which would be followed and remade by each writer in their work. ‘[…] these two languages, that is, the poetic and the practical, do not coincide. ’p.4 Rather than expressing the self, literature or art expresses itself, it’s rules, its freedoms and unfreedoms (which in turn pull into itself and transform the determinations of the external world – of life). Under Shklovsky’s description, art is a device for making the familiar unfamiliar, for directing ‘automatic’ perception towards the particularity of objects and relations. Content, is under this system, simply a pretext for the uprooting of habitual perspectives through literary devices. Similar movements throughout the 20th century developed these formal concerns with reduction, separation and so on: OULIPO, Lettrism, L A N G U A G E poetry and sound and concrete poetry each explored the breaking down of prose and poetry into smaller independent units – clearly an important ur-model for Shklovsky and those who followed after is filmic montage. Therefore, employing the logic of autonomisation, following through what Kracauer called the ‘capitalist ratio’, in art at least, becomes a means to ‘make everything new’.
If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So, eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously – automatically. […] It is this process of automatization that explains the laws of our prose speech with its fragmentary phrases and half-articulated words. Theory of Prose, pp.4-5
Following Braverman, Jameson extends his concept of autonomisation to describe and explain the process of financialisation and the exponential expansion of finance capital since the 1970s. Through finance, capital no longer passes through the classical equation M-C-M’ but instead M passes directly to M Prime. Money makes money. Jameson:
In other words, riches transform into capital itself; this is the autonomization of the process of capital accumulation, which asserts its own logic over that of the production and consumption of goods as such, as well as over the individual entrepreneur and the individual worker. Jameson, p.259
In finance, autonomisation describes eloquently the multi-polar way in which markets seek new vectors of profit, treating investments and debts as the material for many-sided bets and counter bets, spun off over and over as commodities to be traded, secured and re-secured. The steep autonomisation of these processes can be seen in the recent scare stories over high frequency and automatic trades. High volumes of trading are increasingly automated and take place at a speed beyond human perception – this circulating capital moves faster than human time – with all the threats that poses (last May’s Wall Street ‘flash-crash’). Here it is worth noting the feedback loop between computing and management, Charles Babbage was a big influence upon Taylor – so we can see that the early foundations of computing informed the development of intensive management of the labour process, in turn IBM’s punch card system which made abstract labour time as a ‘physical reality’ – a technical object – was developed after the second world war as the model for early computing systems.
In this context, of interest is Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent research into Romano Alquati’s work on cybernetics (published in Quaderni Rossi in two parts in 1962 and 1963). Alquati attempted one of the first Marxist analyses of cybernetics. Alquati saw cybernetics as an extension of the internal bureaucracy that monitors the production process of the factory via control information [informazioni di controllo].
Cybernetics recomposes globally and organically the functions of the general worker that are pulverised into individual micro-decisions: the bit links up the atomised worker to the figures of the Plan. 12 Romano Alquati 1963, p. 134 (translation mine). Quoted in in Pasquinelli, p.6
Moreover, to outline a second pole of further possible research: feedback, if we follow Benedict Seymour’s recent argument, can be seen as deriving from the value form itself as a kind of ‘Ur-form of feedback’ - self-valorising value.
Some further insights from Jacques Camatte, who had discussed finance in terms of autonomisation as early as 1974, describing an: ‘Autonomization of the different products of capital – profit, interest and land rent.’
Autonomisation – which is also ‘the runaway of capital’, becomes a threat, a tendency which threatens to negate capital’s very basis of accumulation - ‘the question that poses itself is how to know how to link the different autonomized movements that are self-autonomizing so that it should not end up in the disaggregation of the totality.’p.139 Camatte frames autonomisation as a historically consistent process for capital: ‘[…] for Marx each moment of capital becomes more or less autonomised capital […]’ Camatte, p.141. In line with Camatte’s view a recent text by two Brazilian academics writing about the financial crisis in the US theorises autonomisation thus:
Autonomisation refers to the ontological tendency that capital has to separate from and to undermine its own material basis of expansion […] The theory of autonomisation has at its core the understanding that the expansion of value constitutes a contradictory dynamic that has both self-enhancing and self-negating effects. Tomas Nielsen Rotta & Rodrigo Alves Teixeira
Camatte understands the expansion of finance capital as a terminal form of autonomisation (money freed of production to self-augment) which challenges capital’s ability to pass through surplus value extraction – an escape from the law of value – only made viable by ‘anthropomorphosis’ the absorption of the totality of ‘human substance’ into capital: ‘the total development of capital as a finished structure, and better still, material community, allows it to escape this fiction because this is accompanied by the phenomenon of anthropomorphosis’. Camatte, p.139 Capital becoming subject is discussed by Marx with regard to machinery and in the Grundrisse. ‘[…] the automaton itself is the subject and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton.’ Capital, p.545 Yet to suggest this as a ‘final solution’, rather than a fatal contradiction, for capital is perhaps going too far…
Camatte connects liberation and autonomisation (proposing that at each phase of autonomisation, of ‘imprisonment of the human being in piecemeal fashion’ there is a correlative movement towards liberation – or autonomy ‘an activity to break passivity and dependence’ Camatte, p.161). Théorie Communiste extend this to social movements: ‘As for activism, it is the autonomisation of this cycle, with all the necessary ideological reformulations that this implies.’ TC, ‘The Present Moment’. TC consider the present ‘crisis of the wage relation’ the writing on the wall for both movements to affirm a worker identity within capitalism (the workers movement) and without as social movements (‘another world is possible’) are forms of alter-autonomisation. In each the limit poses itself at the point of the mobilisation of (abstract man) ‘individuals’ and affirmation in State and in capital as ‘an unsurpassable horizon’.
Here then, some contradictions – as opposed to these ‘alter-autonomisations’, forms of class struggle and social organisation which pass through the logic of autonomisation (recognising that which they autonomise from, or fail to) may appear to be the way to confront and move beyond capital’s rationalising self-extension. This suggests that instead of TC’s ‘positive against positive’ what could be developed is forms of ‘double negative’ (to use the recent strapline of an issue of Mute). The positing of the ‘bad old things’ – of humankind neither as abstract man (the individual) nor as organic unity. ‘Only separation can countermand separation’ Adorno. Therefore not of developing correctives to alienation but developing alienation further in such a way as to bare the present state of things and force self-consciousness into conflict with anthropomorphism. The aesthetic critique is a critique which pursues and makes operable separations, as a forms of ‘mimesis of the hardened and alienated’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory) it confronts capital on its very principles of rationality by carrying them through, yet displaces this out of the exigencies of a productive circuit.
Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement and his trajectory of ‘ostensible surrender’ can be situated within the subsumption of aesthetics and human capacities under a generalising Taylorist logic – both cultural and production-oriented – in post-revolutionary Russia. Shklovsky is criticised by Jameson for lack of ‘historical’ insight. Yet here we might add, that as a Lucaksian, Jameson remains exposed to the Moishe Postone’s critique of Lukacs celebration of historical process. In a note, in Time, Labour, Social Domination, Postone points out that one cannot separate out ‘historical process’ as non-capitalist. Rather capital is characterised by ‘a historical dynamic beyond human control’. ‘Historical process as such cannot be opposed to capitalism.’ Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, Social Domination, p.215 (note). Shklovsky said‘Art converts the particularities of things into perceptible form.’ ‘Letter to Tynyanov’, p.XIX ‘Art processes the ethics and world view of a writer and liberates itself from his original tension. Things change when they land in a book.’ ‘On the Freedom of Art’ quoted in Third Factory, p.xviii. Even according to Jameson, in Shklovsky’s work: […] we are made to realize the incommensurability of words to experience, of models to lived existence … segments of events are fragmented to the point where the infinite divisibility of all human experience in time seems a demonstrable fact.’ Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, p.77. Note the emphasis on time, divisibiliy and non-equivalence. As such, littered with use values thrown out of their habitual context, Shklovsky’s prose (even during it’s ‘productive’ phase) extends and rigourously defends inutility in art and life. There is no moment, either in his theoretical or prose writings, which almost always overlap, when Shklovsky is anything other than committed to the demands of the present, his time, his epoch, however contrarian, ironic or even perverse a position he finds of responding to its exigencies.
Skipped in the version presented at HM
Some questions yet to pose:
My argument proposes that aesthetic models and practices do have somethng to tell political struggles, in fact I would not see them as separate, but I other than in this theoretical context I have very little to say about their concrete applicability. Perhaps at this stage it is better to suspend this question rather than open it to simplistic resolution.
Following up Camatte’s remark above. There is the question of the correlation between the movement of capital or phases of autonomisation and social movements proposing forms of ‘liberation’. For example, the late 1960s and 1970s can be seen both as the release of workers from the factory, self-refusal, forms of autonomy, creation of new subjectivities, and a tremendous defeat through the imposition of neoliberalisation and shift to forms of finance and service related ‘industries’. What is this relationship exactly and what can we learn from it?
Aesthetic activity resists by failing to be free, there is no way to simply bring it inside social confrontation without deforming or instrumentalising it.
The question of mimesis to be developed in political struggles. Against affirmation, demands etc. what forms would not simply amount to slavish behaviour or ‘ostensible surrender’.
Problematise reification – e.g. Lukács notion of ‘reification’ does not derive from value form according to Rose, and this suggests problems also with Jameson’s interpretation of capitalist form perhaps. This discussion also has insights for alienation which has been wielded as an extremely loose term (see below).
Alienation can become a dangerous catch all for contemporary malaise, loosing specificity. Alienation is foremost the separation of the worker from the products of her labour. This basic premise and it’s development in capital’s intensification through processes of autonomisation is sufficient I think for Marx.
Further development of the relation of computing/computerisation and management/rationalistation. There is much more work to do on this, especially if we don’t wish to tolerate theories proposing that capitalism runs on ‘informational value’.
Temporality question of time. A few points could be developed further relating to Time or temporality, it’s partition, relation to the establishment of quantifiable and equivalent labour time.
Further questions of Time, experience and partition. In Shklovsky’s discussion of Lawrence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy:
[…] we are made to realize the incommensurability of words to experience, of models to lived existence … segments of events are fragmented to the point where the infinite divisibility of all human experience in time seems a demonstrable fact.’ Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, p.77.
Time-sharing in computing and the reality of parallel processing dramatically extends the logic of autonomisation in the labour process.
Correspondingly there is a question of free time, social reproduction and habituation not addressed in the above paper. Karl Marx: ‘Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production as this different subject. Marx, Grundrisse, p.712.
Finally the possibility raises itself of making a nod to feminist and Queer theory. Making strange or queering could be associated with deflection of normalisation of gender stereotypes, non-equivalence or incommensurability, non-identity – not by simply sidestepping these identities but through appropriation and emptying out of the ‘content’ of gendered identities.
References
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Jacques Camatte, ‘This World We Must Leave’, in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, New York: Autonomedia, 1998.
Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 246-265.
Frederic Jameson, Brecht and Method, London: Verso, 1999.
Seigfreid Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, Cambridge Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Owen Hatherley, ‘Who’s afraid of the Verfremdungseffekt?’ in Militant Modernism, London: Zero Books, 2008.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, [Trans. Martin Nicolaus], New York, Vintage, 1974
Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1, [Trans. Ben Fowkes], London: Penguin, 1990.
Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Machinic Capitalism and Network Surplus Value: Towards a Political Economy of the Turing Machine’, unpublished. Draft: http://bit.ly/nljAVo
Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, Social Domination,
Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity, Basic Books, 1992.
Jaques Rancière, Staging the People: the proletarian and his double, London: Verso, 2011.
Gilian Rose, ‘The Lament over Reification’ in The Melancholy Science, New York : Columbia University Press, 1978.
Tomas Nielsen Rotta & Rodrigo Alves Teixeira ‘Marxian Theory of Financialisation of the U.S. Economy’, http://www.sep.org.br/artigo/6_congresso/2510_399bd934f1de4cc35bdfe9be2404a9ce.pdf
Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays, (Eds.) Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, University of Nebraska Press, 1965. (original published 1917).
Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory, [Trans. Richard Sheldon], London & Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2002.
Viktor Shklovsky, Knight’s Move, [Trans. Richard Sheldon], London & Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2005 (original published 1923).
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, [Trans. Benjamin Sher], Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2009.
John Willett, Brecht in Context, London: Methuen, 1984.
